Tag Archives: Nazi

Life Magazine has a fascinating gallery of colour photographs of Nazi myth-making, taken by one of Hitler’s personal photographers, Hugo Jaeger:

In this gallery, LIFE.com takes a long, hard look at the aesthetics of the Reich’s propaganda machinery, from the single swastika to the epic torchlit celebrations during Hitler’s 50th birthday. Here are the almost inconceivably vast Nuremberg rallies, where individuals are subsumed into one Fuhrer-worshiping organism. Here are the gargantuan Nazi banners, towering above a sea of faces that fade into insignificance. Here are thousands of tanned, near-naked youth, re-enacting a manufactured, cobbled-together and thoroughly mythical past when “Aryans” gamboled beneath a Teutonic sun.

The crew from Vice Magazine visit Nueva Germania, a town in the Paraguayan jungle which was intended to be a homeland for German white supremacists in the 1800’s. There is also a book on the subject, which looks fascinating:

Forgotten Fatherland: The Search for Elisabeth Nietzsche, by Ben Macintyre (1992).
The intrepid Macintyre took a boat trip into the Paraguayan jungle in 1991 in search of the surviving inhabitants of Nueva Germania—an abortive “Aryan” colony founded in the late nineteenth century by the ghastly Elisabeth Nietzsche, racist sister of the philosopher. He found a weird village of unreconstructed white supremacists—inbred, half mad, many of them still speaking a kind of zombie German—and heard some curious and frightening stories about Josef Mengele. A true-life Heart of Darkness.

After Carl von Ossietzky was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1935, the Nazi government banned any Germans from holding any Nobel Prize in protest. In order to save the medals of Max von Laue and James Franck, Hungarian chemist George de Hevesy dissolved their medals in aqua regia, which he left on the shelf in has lab to evade discovery by the Nazis. After the war, he precipitated the gold out of the solution and sent it back to Sweden, where it was recast and reawarded by the Nobel Committee.

Historians working in Germany and the US claim to have found drawings of a design for a nuclear weapon designed by Nazi scientists in WWII:

The newly uncovered document was discovered after the publication of Karlsch’s book, Hitlers Bombe (Hitler’s Bomb), in which he made the nuclear test claim.

“The Nazis were far away from a ‘classic’ atomic bomb. But they hoped to combine a ‘mini-nuke’ with a rocket,” Dr Karlsch told the BBC News website.

“The military believed they needed around six months more to bring the new weapon into action. But the scientists knew better how difficult it was to get the enriched uranium required.”

The head of Nazi Germany’s nuclear energy programme was the physicist Werner Heisenberg. Though he was highly accomplished in other areas of physics, Heisenberg failed to understand a key aspect of nuclear fission chain reactions.

I usually try not to post what are the current memes, but this one is too good to pass up. It’s of Congressman Barney Frank’s response to a woman who seems to think public health care is a Nazi policy. Wow. Ignorance like that really frightens me.